Ethics Newsline®

Sex abuse scandal, human rights, and role of science figure in world-press reports

WASHINGTON and NEW YORK
Ethical concerns dominated coverage of last week’s visit to the United States by Pope Benedict XVI. Among the stories:

• In a surprise move, the pope last week met with five people from Boston who said they had been sexually abused by priests. The Boston Globe reports that the meeting, held in Washington, was brokered by Boston cardinal Sean O’Malley, who told the Globe he had given the pope a list of nearly 1,500 people who alleged they were abused by clergy in the Boston archdiocese. The series of sex-abuse revelations, along with allegations that clergy were sheltered by the church, rocked the U.S. Catholic community during the past decade and triggered hundreds of lawsuits. According to UPI, Boston was at the epicenter of the scandal, paying out more than $150 million. Bernard Law, Boston’s former archbishop, was forced to resign after it was revealed that he shuffled alleged abusers from parish to parish and covered up apparent molestation of children by priests. Law relocated to Rome and was given several prominent appointments in the Roman Catholic church, which he retains, by pope John Paul II.
• The pope, during his first visit to the United Nations, stressed another ethics issue: human rights. Canadian National Post religion columnist father Raymond De Souza reports that the pope emphasized the obligation of the international community to intervene to protect individual rights, saying that threats to human rights often appear in the guise of cultural differences or religious schisms. According to a report from the U.K. Guardian, the pope used the sixtieth anniversary of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights to argue that the organization should occupy the “moral center” of world affairs.
• The pope’s views on the moral underpinnings of science are still largely undefined, according to a report by National Geographic reporter Anne Minard. Minard writes that even before he assumed leadership of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI had come under fire for “what some say are his anti-science views. He has been criticized for comments about the 17th-century astronomer Galileo, stem cell research, and evolution.” TIME magazine reports that the issue of the ethics of science did surface briefly during the pope’s address to the United Nations, in which he maintained that regulations on research “never require a choice to be made between science and ethics: rather, it is a question of adopting a scientific method that is truly respectful of human imperatives.”

Sources: Boston Globe, Apr. 20 — TIME, Apr. 20 — National Post, Apr. 19 — Guardian, Apr. 19 — National Geographic, Apr. 18 — UPI, Apr. 17.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Feb. 4 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 28 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 14 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 15, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 15, 2007.